A Research Review of Public Figure Threats, Approaches, Attacks, and Assassinations in the United States

Abstract

An archival descriptive study of public figure attackers in the United States between 1995 and 2015 was undertaken. Fifty-six incidents were identified, primarily through exhaustive internet searches, composed of 58 attackers and 58 victims. A code book was developed which focused upon victims, offenders, pre-attack behaviors including direct threats, attack characteristics, post-offense and other outcomes, motivations and psychological abstracts. The average interrater agreement for coding of bivariate variables was 0.835 (intraclass correlation coefficient). The three most likely victim categories were politicians, judges, and athletes. Attackers were males, many with a psychiatric disorder, most were grandiose, and most had both a violent and nonviolent criminal history. The known motivations for the attacks were often angry and personal, the most common being dissatisfaction with a judicial or other governmental process (23%). In only one case was the primary motivation to achieve notoriety. Lethality risk during an attack was 55%. Collateral injury or death occurred in 29% of the incidents. Only 5% communicated a direct threat to the target beforehand. The term "publicly intimate figure" is introduced to describe the sociocultural blurring of public and private lives among the targets, and its possible role in some attackers' perceptions and motivations.

Sexual Selection for Moral Virtues

“…A woman who knows her ordnance might admire the sniper's good genes indicators, such as his resourcefulness (the M82A1 costs $7,775 retail), his physical condition (the 13 kilogram, 145 cm-long rifle is hard to carry), and his marksmanship (the 800 meter head shot was near the rifle's maximum effective antipersonnel range of 1000 meters). Yet, she may equally worry about his good parent indicators: his vigilante action may reveal psychopathy, paranoid schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, impulsiveness, fame-seeking narcissism, or high-risk sensation seeking (Meloy et al 2004). She can only tell by gathering further information about his virtues, both moral and nonmoral, which is a central function of prolonged human courtship.…”

Stalking: the state of the science

“…Research in this area is limited, but growing (Meloy et al, 2004, in press). Among the compelling fi ndings in the few completed studies is the predominance of severe mental illness among those who fi xate upon and pursue public fi gures (Fixated Research Group, 2006;Meloy et al, 2004), and the very low frequency of violence among these individuals (Mohandie et al, 2006). The latter fi nding, however, may be largely a product of effective security surrounding the object of pursuit.…”

The Concept of Leakage in Threat Assessment

“…Exploratory research in various domains of intended and targeted violence beyond school shootings, such as public figure assassination and adult mass murder, and the operational development of both threat assessment protocols and threat assessment organizations continues (Borum, Fein, Vossekuil, & Bergland, 1999;Borum & Reddy, 2001;Calhoun & Weston, 2003;Fein, Vossekuil & Holden, 1995;Fein & Vossekuil, 1998;Meloy et al, 2004a;Meloy, Sheridan, & Hoffmann, 2008). As the nascent science of threat assessment develops, it is judicious to revisit and refine terminology to standardize both practice and further research.…”